Fifty Years Today

In 1958, I was a college freshman looking forward to summer employment at Crater Lake National Park. I lived in Akin Hall, the women’s dormitory on campus, and can remember sitting with friends on the second-floor fire escape one clear night to watch Sputnik cross overhead, imagining that we could hear its radio signal. It was the first man-made object to orbit the earth and it had been accomplished by the Soviet Union. Our nation was caught up in the Second Red Scare, fearful of the spread of communism and worried about espionage by Soviet agents. We were in the middle of the Cold War arms race; each side was busy testing nuclear bombs and missiles. And there were many who were concerned that we were in danger of a nuclear war.

A Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or CDN was begun in Great Britain. The group sponsored mass marches and sit-downs in London. Bertrand Russell was head of the group at that time and asked that a symbol be designed for the demonstrations. British artist and conscientious objector Gerald Holtom designed the symbol that we now recognize as the Peace symbol, one of the most widely known symbols in the world. It was unveiled February 21, 1958 – fifty years ago today - and made its public debut at a 1958 Easter weekend anti-nuclear march. It later migrated to the U.S., where it was adopted by student pacifists and later by the anti-Vietnam War movement.

We haven’t made much progress in fifty years. Now we have an endless “War on Terror;” we wage a preemptive war on another nation by claiming (falsely) that they have “weapons of mass destruction” while we continue to develop and sell our own weapons of mass destruction. We have invented and manufactured atom bombs, napalm, bunker-busters, cluster bombs, neutron bombs, space lasers, and phosphorous bombs. So far, the United States has refused to sign treaties against land mines, child soldiers or the weaponization of space, and call “quaint” and “obsolete” the Geneva Conventions against torture and war crimes (please read Love, American Style on Common Dreams). If the budget is approved, military spending will increase 36% in the 2009 US Federal Budget, giving military spending 54% of the total budget The USA, responsible for about 80 per cent of the global increase in military spending in 2005, is the principal determinant of the current world trend, and the United States is already spending more for defense than all the other nations in the world combined. From the 1950’s "The Pogo Papers," come these famous words spoken by Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Let’s get those Peace symbols out on the street. We need them now more than ever.

... P. L. Morningstar
.